


Salem

by Mad_Max



Series: Bible Belt [2]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: 90s AU, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Cults, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-05 12:56:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18829108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: It’s 1996. DOMA is in the works, Bill Clinton is president, and Credence Barebone has escaped from the New Salem religious cult. After his budding relationship with newscaster Percival Graves was disrupted by a public scandal and as the trial against Mary Lou Barebone and New Salem looms ahead, Credence struggles to come to terms with his role in the destruction.





	1. The Only Living Boy in New York

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weeeeeooooooo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weeeeeooooooo/gifts), [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts), [LotusRox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LotusRox/gifts).



> Welp, this took forever. Expressing my thanks in advance for everyone who reads and drops kudos/comments. I hope you enjoy!

_The New York Times_ did his favourite story on the two of them.

In all truth, it was less a story on the two of them as a story on the broader context of the New Salem cult and homosexuality, in which he and Credence featured prominently.

They had somehow managed to dig up a better photo of Credence than the wide-eyed shot from the night of the raid.

In the new one, he wore a too-small corduroy boiler suit with a hoop-zipper that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Percy’s ’76 senior high yearbook. His bangs were cut awkwardly short and blunt and plastered to his forehead. His head was bowed, as though he hadn’t expected or particularly wanted to be caught on camera, as though he knew the photograph was bound for an international newspaper, captioned with his name, his age, and a cute byline about being _Caught Between Heaven and Hell: When Religion and Sexuality Collide._

Bylines and photographs aside, the article was less unkind than some, which redeemed it in Percy’s esteem.

Unlike the others, there was no insinuation that Credence wanted to destroy his mother or his home in a final act of revenge for their stifling his sexuality. The journalist in question avoided going into gross detail on the disciplinary practises of the New Salem cult. There was only a short description of the switches and leather belts used to keep their children on the righteous path. The word homosexuality was employed sparingly, scientifically. The Sodomy Laws of 1965 were loosely referenced. The book of Leviticus was cited. Ex-members had been tracked down and quoted testifying yet again to the abuse they endured in the name of God, that they assumed or knew firsthand to have been endured by Credence. The article ended on an ambiguous note, neither damning nor entirely friendly. But it was not damning.

Percy fixed it to the fridge with an old magnet and reread it in the morning while coffee brewed and Seraphina filled him in on the latest from the newsroom over the phone.

“It’s on its way out as a story. Been a few weeks now, and no one can find anything new - ”

“Because there _isn’t_ anything new, because it’s _bullshit_ \- ”

He stirred cream into his coffee. He heaped three teaspoons of sugar over the surface. 

“Percy, just shut up and listen to me for a second. You’re not letting me talk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good. Okay - I spoke to Shaw this morning, and he thinks the board is leaning towards reinstatement. Travers stopped calling, and no one really thinks you did anything wrong here, but they want assurances that your sexuality won’t get in the way of your work - ”

The spoon clattered into the sink.

“Oh, fuck that.”

“I know. It’s shit, but it’s your job back.”

“Not my job. Not if I have to apologise for who I am just to keep it.”

“What do you want, Perce?” Seraphina’s sigh rattled the line. “They’re not going to budge on this. I told you to be careful with this kid - ”

“Christ, what is it with you people? He’s twenty four. He’s not a _kid.”_

 _“Whatever._ He looks like a Boy Scout.”

“Eagle scout, at least.”

“Fuck. You sick fuck.”

Her laughter barked, itched in the depth of his ear canal. His coffee was too hot. He dumped it into the sink.

“Listen,” said Seraphina after a pause. “You know how I feel about it, but the fact is that we can’t be open about these things. I don’t want to lose you on the team, Percy. Especially not now. They’re tearing your Eagle Scout to pieces here.” 

 

 

 

 

The cult boy - Credence - hesitated on her threshold.

“Your face is bruised,” said Nagini. “You need some ice for that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She had to take him by the bony wrist to guide him inside. Odd boy. It was nothing like handling men at the club, even the drunkest. Credence was quiet, sniffled. He stumbled and then shuffled after her to the kitchen and allowed himself to be pushed onto the edge of the bed beside it.

“What happened?”

The Band-aids were old, yellowed and brittle in the back of the cabinet behind a stack of plastic plates. _Ayah_ -old. Her chest pinched as she tore the cardboard from the top of the box and dumped them out across the bed. 

“Somebody jumped you?”

“No,” said Credence softly. “Percy - didn’t - do - nothing.”

He winced at the gentle pad of her fingertips across his bruised forehead but kept steady, upright. The kitchen table was messier than she had noticed when she went to bed. It had been so late. Something was off about the way Credence blinked at her. Doll eyes. Not quite present. His nostrils were red and his lip cracked, but Nagini focused on the split skin around the bruise. 

Skin knits itself back together, she thought, like darned socks. Little ridges where holes used to be.

“There,” she said.

Credence’s jaw spasmed around his slurred thanks _._ The butterfly-shaped bandaid holding his forehead together looked like a little target. Twenty-five cents for five rounds. Automat games she used to play after school, waiting for Ayah to come back from work. Bang, bang, Cult Boy.

“Tshankyou,” he finally managed to say, and vomited the rest of his gratitude over the kitchen table.

 

He slept on her bed for three days straight, barely waking for food or water, which she left on the bedside crate, just in case. It was not mothering. He wasn’t small. She would never be any bigger. It was not friendship, either. She hardly knew him.

He muttered in his sleep. This was how she learned about Ma and a cow and a woman named Tina and the man named Percy. He quoted the Bible. She recognised it from her _Bible as Literature_ class, two semesters prior. The only available night class that wasn’t math.

He cried out in his sleep sometimes, too. She felt sorry leaving him for work, but the rent wouldn’t pay itself.

She didn’t tell the other girls at the club. Not the pale-haired Russian with the worryingly empty eyes. Not Candy, the redhead who liked to brag about picking mens’ pockets in the dark. Not Lucia with the good body and the little boy and the boyfriend paging her all the time and the wad of tips she took home that always made Nagini’s fistful of singles seem pathetic by comparison.

He was always in bed, in the same spot, when she slipped back into the darkened apartment in the early morning. His arms and legs black lumps beneath the sheet. His body was thin and warm. She put a pillow between them but moved it so she could see his face. It was a handsome face. Even bruised. Even though it did nothing for her, not in that way. She could appreciate beauty, a well-cut jaw. Credence looked like a bit like something out of the Met. A statue, a painting of some 19th century lover laid out on the twisted sheet. The black hair and pale face of a Caravaggio, like Ingres in his self portrait - Davidian proportion, neoclassical, fluid and gentle in the greenish light of early morning - Toulouse-Lautrec. He was always warm, a little sweaty, a human radiator. The thoughts embarrassed her, so she put the pillow back.

The first time he curled up against her back, on top of the pillow, she rolled him away, groaning. The second time - it was cold. She told herself he was a visiting cousin. It was not mothering. His need was overwhelming. Her brain followed sluggishly in its wake. Get up, Cult Boy. Bang bang. Chop chop.

He woke up fully after three days and the first words out of his mouth were prayer.

She tried:

“What happened to your face?”

Sorry, he said so regularly the word lost meaning. I don’t know, please, sorry, sorry sorry sorry. 

She came home from work one night with bags of burgers and fries to a scrubbed bathroom, a made bed. The sheet corners were folded and tucked. She could imagine him bending over the edge of the mattress, smoothing them flat. Delicate and cautious. At dinner, he took his time with each fry, like he needed her to see his gratitude. The bathroom lights flickered.

“I can fix it,” he said. 

“Were you in an accident?”

“Sort of.”

He declined to elaborate.

“Did someone hit you?”

He said, Oh it was nothing, like a person who has had a lot of nothing before.

Sometimes she reconsidered her decision not to pry. She wanted to ask, who taught you how to make a bed? His hands shook around the sheet. They shook around mugs and sink taps and limp french fries. Sometimes he looked very close to elaborating, and she found herself stilling in anticipation. Watching her shadow, like he was a bird in the park grass who might flutter away at the slightest breeze. 

Coming home from work another night, she was greeted at the door by the heavy smell of cooked vegetables.

“It’s just cabbage and potatoes,” Credence explained. “Your neighbour asked me if I wanted them, so I thought - I don’t know if you like cabbage and potatoes.” 

He ladled wilted cabbage on paper plates as she took off her shoes, looked over the tidied room, the sheets tucked neatly beneath the mattress at each corner. Credence stared at the pile of damp green leaves in the centre of the skillet like he would like nothing better than to cook alongside it. The bruise on his forehead had changed colour, she noticed. His eyes were clear. 

“I’m sorry for using your stove,” he said. “But you always buy food, so I thought - ”

“It’s nice. Thank you.”

His hands twitched around the plate and ladle. She busied herself taking forks from the old tomato can on the counter, fighting the urge to push him back out of the corner that marked the kitchen from the living space from the sleeping space. She never raised her voice, but she would speak sternly, as to a robber or a toddler on a busy street corner: What are you doing here, Cult Boy? Still?

Somehow it felt more transient when she was the one supplying the food. Cheeseburger Happy Meals, or baskets of limp fries from the diner next to the club. The costs were beginning to add up, a good reason to broach the subject of how long he intended to be here.

 _Once you let him into your kitchen, he’ll never leave,_ is the kind of warning her mother would have given. Did she need him to leave? His company was anything but unpleasant, and he cleaned, and he cooked, and he fixed the broken chain lock on the door one afternoon while she was at school.

“I used to pull up potatoes from the garden when I was younger,” he said. 

They sat themselves side-by-side on the edge of the bed and balanced the soggy plates on their knees.

“I stole the little ones from the grocery store,” said Nagini.

The memory trickled back unbidden, blurred as though by old tape. Small hands in a bin of red potatoes the size of marbles. Why was she telling him this? Yellowed linoleum, grocery store music. A plastic Minnie Mouse pot from her toy kitchen. Bits of seed and uncooked noodle. Everything boiled and consumed in lukewarm water from the tap, in the shower or while the TV ran in the living room.

“Raw potato can make you sick,” said Credence. “Once my mother - ”

Whatever his mother had once done, he buried in a little heap of cabbage on one side of his plate, shovelled into his mouth, and swallowed.

“I’ll just clean up,” he said.

This was the way with Credence. Every half-finished sentence like the piece to a puzzle with too many pieces to begin. The incomplete pictures formed a hazy patchwork, nothing close to a timeline, but a general overview. In Nagini’s mind, the cult garden was clouded by mist and rich in black dirt, green grass. At harvest she imagined the blunt end of a shovel slicing deep into the meat of the earth and pulling up potatoes, carrots, radishes, Credence a pale and spindly child with dirty knees and earth-black eyes cradling vegetables in his shirt or a basket. Some realist masterpiece - Peasant Boy In Field At Harvest. Late 19th century, always French, always pinched-lip serious and more beautiful than the memories perhaps deserved. It was difficult to tell without Credence’s testimony to compare to.

What she did get from him was the address of friends in Chelsea. Yes, we can go there, she had said. He huddled before the TV in tortured hesitation for the better half of an afternoon before deciding to cook lunch instead.

After the friends’ address came a phone number without a name. He was hesitant to call. There had been telephones in his cult but they were useless without knowledge of numbers, and anyway they had all lived so close. It was just as easy to send one of the younger kids off on an errand or to deliver a note by hand. She drank these details in like water, made the appropriate adjustments and additions to her mental brushwork. He cleaned, fixed the crooked hinge to the bathroom door, cooked oatmeal every morning for breakfast.

“Junk food is poison,” he explained, red-cheeked and oat-slicked spoon in hand. “My mother -”

These early days were something like a prequel, a pre-story Nagini compressed into the span of a week or so to agree with the calendar pinned to the back of the bathroom door. They felt like months. Credence asleep in her bed in the darkened flat. Scavenged fast food in paper bags or cabbage and onion from the scratched pan on the stove. Sometimes while he cooked she watched his hands. If he was busy enough, he couldn’t whisk them into his pockets before she glimpsed the knotted skin that marked his palms and knuckles like lines on a map.

They’re just scars, he said once, in the time between Before and After. His body was all hard, lean lines. He chewed his lip on one side.  
I know, said Nagini. Do they hurt?   
Used to, he said. Not so much anymore.

Carmen was the first friend she made in the post-Ayah wasteland of twelve and thirteen. Wide-mouthed, with metal on her teeth and a way of knotting words around her tongue that singled out her foreignness in the pastel-walled Waldorf classroom they had both been assigned to, she was as beautiful as she was alone. They fell into each other’s arms like two young soldiers after battle. Sole survivors of a violence for which there were not yet words. Sharing lunch in the back corner, candy wrappers crinkling in their pockets from Carmen’s mother, holding hands on the thirty block walk from school to the silent apartment where Nagini’s only aunt had already emptied the closets. They would often lean close, cheek to cheek, giggling or whispering. _Love you, Carmen, you’re my best forever._ _You’re my sister, Genie, my real sister for life._

Only Carmen called her Genie and not Nagini, or Nadj-eye-ni, Nadgeenee, Na-howdoyoupronounceyournameitssounique. She said, because you’re magic, you’re the only one who ever tried to be my friend for me, not just to be nice. 

Credence was also beautiful and alone. Tragic-pretty. Black-eyed Carmen-pretty, a lonely boy with a cautious slow way of moving around a room and a soft way of asking how she’d fared at school. Measured and scared in equal parts. Not like Carmen, who had been loud. Carmen at twelve with the ears of an eighty-year old, who knew why she was different and was not ashamed. Credence was a listing body of a house with shame eating its walls from the inside out like black mould.

She felt it when he said, they’re just scars. The way he hid his hands in his sleeve and always hesitated before taking a step across the room, like the floor might deem him unworthy at any time, open up and swallow him live. The way he bit his cheek or his lip before speaking, held his breath when she lie down on the bed beside him, clenched his fingers into tight fists. His shame was white-knuckled and tongueless. I’m like you, she wanted to say. I speak that language, too.

“How did you get this apartment?”

“From my parents.”

Two days. She wrote her final essay for World History in the public library while he cleaned. 

“My parents died,” she said finally. They hadn’t addressed it since.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t believe they went to God,” she said. “I don’t believe in God.”

 

His first trip out was to the public library, then the grocery store, then the bodega on the corner. Central Park. McDonalds. White-knuckled and wide-eyed. He followed her like a baby duck over the slanted pavement. His body hunched against the wind, and then it was not the wind but the busy of other people alongside them. She wanted to straighten him out. Shake the kink from his spine like a piece of damp laundry.

“My dad used to take me here when I was little.”

They did a round of the nonfiction books, the microfilm machines, the newspapers.

“How did he die?” 

“Sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry had been Carmen’s magic on the first day. Loud and thick-syllabled in her wide mouth. Not, I’m sorry that happened to you, or I’m sorry they died. Not I’m sorry for your loss, sorry to hear it. Just sorry. Sorry meant it couldn’t be changed but had happened anyway and had to be acknowledged. No fuss. No poetry. No expectation of a thank you, or a strangled sob or any kind of response at all. It was a one-way transaction, like a deposit into a stranger’s bank account.

“My dad was a haemophiliac,” she explained as they browsed the racks of dog-eared magazines. “It’s a disease you’re just born with. Sometimes he had to get blood, and then the blood was bad. He got sick and then my mom did too. They both died before they knew what killed them.”

She watched his hand retract with a music magazine. 

“They said it was pneumonia on the hospital paperwork,” said Nagini. “But no one wanted to touch him. They don’t just let you die of pneumonia anymore like that.”

She wasn’t sure why she told him. His fingers rolled into tight fists, he only nodded. He said nothing. What was there to say? I’m sorry, that’s awful, poor thing; Nagini had heard it all. If he had said something or apologised again to her, she thought, that would have marked the end. Bye bye, Cult Boy. It would have been clear then that he would never get it the way Carmen got it. He squeezed her hand as she took his. They checked out their books, slipped the music magazine into Credence’s backpack to borrow, and left. 

These outings grew from weekly to daily occurrences. Hand-in-hand, they would make their way on foot or by bus to the library or the park where Nagini would read books on art history and Credence the same tatty music magazine with the same article in it about the suicide of Kurt Cobain, dated two years prior.

No one told me he died, he kept saying.

She tried to imagine living in a world where knowledge of mass-cultural events like the death of a popular rockstar was not intrinsic. Credence was like an alien in his outdated jeans and baggy flannels. At times petrified, then impassive. Even his smile looked like a knock-off, like it was a skill he had never quite mastered but had learned to mimic by looking at the statues in the courtyard of Greek and Roman art at the Met.

“We can have a funeral for him,” said Nagini finally.

They were sitting in the thickest patch of grass they had been able to find, on a small hill in the park. Credence pulled the cans of his headphones from his ears.

“What?”

“A funeral for Kurt Cobain, if you want. We can light some candles and you can say a few words.”

“A few words,” he repeated slowly. “About Kurt Cobain?”

“About whatever you want. Whatever you feel like saying.”

 _Whatever Credence felt like saying_ trickled through the cracks of their comfortable silence and the pages of Picasso’s blue period and the vibrancy of Frida Kahlo’s self portraits in droplets. First it was about Nirvana, the newness of music that wasn’t religious. Nagini listened around a paragraph on colour and the human brain as he twisted the skin over his knuckle. She flicked to a new page, more neuroscience; Credence cracked open the plastic shell of his walkman to show her the tape inside. 

“I made this mix as a joke,” he said. “It’s all love songs, but they’re dark, or Christian. I was going to show it to - to my friend. There’s a television show about finding love in the city….”

They bought votive candles and chopped cheese for their funeral dinner from the bodega around the corner while Credence searched his backpack for an appropriate tape. There was something almost fun about preparing together, draping the bed in a square of black fabric that had once been a tablecloth, when there was an apartment with a living room, two parents, and a kitchen table. They threaded paper flowers from an old art project into the blinds, laid their sandwiches out on the bed for “the reception”, arranged the candles on the floor in the shape of a cross and then a star and finally a circle around them as they sat cross-legged and frowning at one another in somber contemplation.

“Dearly Beloved,” said Nagini. “We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Kurt Cobain.” 

“Is that what you say at funerals here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Okay,” said Credence. He waved his hand and jumped as the flame of a candle began to sputter in its glass. “At home, we said, ‘ _under His eye_ ’.”

“No, you didn’t. That’s from a book.” 

“No,” he smiled. “Okay, we said “Dearly Beloved”, too, but ‘ _under His eye_ ’ sounds more like something you would say in a cult, doesn’t it?”

Because she agreed that “ _under His eye’_ sounded more cult-like, the sermon was adjusted: 

“We are gathered here today, under His eye, to mourn the passing of Kurt Cobain.”

“Even though he died two years ago.”

“Even though he died two years ago,” Nagini agreed, “Because you didn’t know until last week. Do you want to say a few words?”

“I don’t know.”

“What to say?”

“I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

The same candle sputtered and went out. Credence struck a match on the back of the matchbox.

“I’m the only one here,” said Nagini. “I don’t think you really can say the wrong thing.” 

“I’m not a good speaker.” He re-lit the candle and pinched the flame from the tip of the match with his fingers. “Like Moses.”

“Uncircumcised lips.”

They exchanged another smile.

“Yes.” 

“What would your mother say?”

“Suicide is self-murder and sin, and there’s no place for it in God’s Kingdom,” answered Credence promptly. He pinched the flame of the re-lit candle into smoke. “When I was twelve, Ma Humility shot herself in the head with a shotgun behind Main Chapel. They buried her by the fence at night, so she wouldn’t mix with anyone who died in good faith, and Ma said as much about sin and self-murder, and anyone who drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes or took dope was as good as a self-murderer, too.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Well,” said Credence, standing. “So is beating kids. So is war and all the killing out here and a lot of other things.”

They left the candles to whittle themselves into smoke in the growing darkness as Nagini dressed for work and Credence for bed. Was she imagining the tight pull of his lip into the hollow of his cheek, the curl of his fingers back into fists where all week had been open palm? He slid the styrofoam box of sandwiches into the fridge and nodded in silent goodbye as she slipped through the front door.

Why had she asked him what his mother would say? Enough about that woman had been covered by the news - morning, midday, and evening. Nagini had seen the reports on stolen children and beatings and threats and ransom. She didn’t need the details, not exactly. What she had wanted was for Credence to tell her himself, in his own words. As a friend, she realised. Her token clinked flatly into the slot in the turnstile, allowing her to pass through. She reshouldered her backpack. Was Credence angry with her, or with his mother?

Carmen’s parents had separated when she was three years old. Her father, unable to occupy a space in which all the attention and affection of Carmen’s mother had to be shared with another, had purchased a one-way ticket to Hong Kong. He sent letters at birthdays and for holidays, often confused dates or included gifts that were obviously dredged up from the debris piled at the bottom of a drawer. _I wish I could be angry with him_ , Carmen had confided once. _I shouldn’t, but I hate my mom for it sometimes, even though it’s not her fault. Sometimes I wish she’d just get married again._

 _At least you can hate your mom_ , Nagini had thought at the time. _At least you still have a mother left to hate_.

She wanted to be angry with Credence in return. Get over it, Cult Boy! Maybe she would tell him that when she got home. He sometimes waited for her now, if her shift wasn’t too late. _I like to stay up and read_ , he said, but his eyes were ringed grey and glassy. In sleep he had begun to wrap his body around hers. He would whisper his goodnight prayers and she would whisper them back to him, like a conversation. If he cried, it was his own business. She pretended not to hear it, but she took his hand and squeezed. She only ever cried in her shower. It was more practical that way, less clean-up.

How had they become friends so quickly? 

She hoped he wasn’t angry with her. Anger at his mother would be easier to handle even if it was a problem without an obvious answer. The night prior, before falling asleep, he had muttered something about visiting her in jail. Never, thought Nagini, not in a million years. It was such a bad idea. She said nothing and let her fingertips graze the base of the lamp after Credence asked her to leave it on.

They shared their fear of the dark. They also shared not speaking about it.


	2. Benedictus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Queenie is on her own. Credence visits Ma in jail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with this story and even stopped to leave comments and kudos after my long hiatus! I'm getting back into the swing of it now, after a little break from writing. 
> 
> I do have a playlist for this, in keeping with the last vic, but it's a bit all over the place right now. 
> 
> Important songs for Credence:
> 
> "Keeping the Customer Satisfied" by Simon and Garfunkel, as well as "Benedictus" and "Homeward Bound" and "Summertime" by Janis Joplin.

Queenie woke in the early morning to the slamming of the front door. Hot, she thought. It was unseasonably so already for mid-May. The sheets clung damply to her skin. She pulled the blanket to her chin and closed her eyes. Sleeping in a too-warm bed was easier alone. Jacob had always run balmy. Today there were no sweat-slicked legs pressed into her sweat-slicked legs. She wondered if Tina had taken lunch or was planning to buy something later, or if she was even eating lunch anymore at all. Jacob, she thought, would never give up lunch just because of a silly fight. If there was one thing he had going for him, it was his good sense.

Thinking about Jacob was giving her a headache. She opened her eyes. Maybe there was something to Tina’s singular insistence on being out the door before eight-thirty. She could always try it this morning, see if it did anything for her mood. Maybe she would enjoy going out more either way.

The house had been uncomfortably empty for weeks now. Without Tina hunched bleary-eyed and scowling into her coffee, Newt with his newspapers and contraband filched from the Central Park Zoo cluttering the table, and Jacob humming over the stove, it was just Queenie wiping the counters. Queenie scrubbing the stove. Queenie and the radio and NPR, which had yet to abandon her, although she sometimes wished it would.

“Our little friend is in Harlem,” Vinda huffed into the phone as she wiped wet coffee grind from the side of the machine.

“What?”

“He called his mother, he’s going to see her.”

“How do you know?”

She was already smearing lipstick across her mouth, shoes half-on, as Vinda fed her the rest of the story. Mary Lou Barebone had contacted a colleague of Vinda’s, a name Queenie didn’t need to know, but suffice to say, blah blah blah. _Blah, blah, blah_ was Vinda’s favourite American phrase. She used it so often that Queenie had begun to tune out as soon as she heard the opening syllables. As good a friend - and something more - as Vinda had become in the past weeks with Jacob acting funny and Tina not speaking to her, she was also incredibly, well, French.

“You’re going out today?” Vinda asked sharply. Even without seeing her, Queenie could imagine her rouged lips pulled into a pout.

“Just to the store,” she lied and threaded an arm through the sleeve of her pink raincoat.

“We can meet for coffee, if you like.”

“Sure, honey, I’ll give you a call later. Bye!”

 

 

The day her parents died, Queenie went to Coney Island by herself.

She was fifteen and had not yet outgrown the charms of the Cyclone, the wind whipping her hair across her face, the tug of the car over the track around a tight corner, her heart following half a beat behind.

The message came by way of a Polish relative in Israel, the way so many messages did. Knotted around so many corners. Moscow to Warsaw to Tel Aviv to Brighton Beach. Her heart following half a beat behind.

She did not cry, but she did tell the man collecting tickets that her parents had died. He let her ride as long as she wanted.

It was always easy to get men to do things she wanted them to do. Even at fifteen, she had been tall and blond and bright-eyed and pretty. At twelve she grew breasts. At thirteen she bled. Tina said, _you got yours later than me_ and showed her how to use a tampon from a cardboard applicator in the bathroom beside the school cafeteria. The men followed. They called out on street corners. They touched on the bus, in queues in shops. Outside, on the street, she held Teenie’s arm in her own and laughed loudly and smiled and sang in Russian: _one, two, three, four, five, a hare went out for a walk. And then came the hunter in red and shot the poor hare dead! Bang bang, oh oh, my hare is going to die. But when I brought him home, he turned out to be alive!_

If we sing silly songs, she thought, they’ll know we’re still little girls and go away.

If we don’t look back, she thought.

If we only go out in the day.

If we make ourselves small.

Credence would never have experienced anything like that, but he had the same hunted hare look that she had felt tugging at the corners of her eyes on evening streets and nights absent the hot traffic that choked every intersection around Brighton and Coney Island in summer. The impulse had been there, too, to fill the space left silent by his terror with idle chatter. Something to scare away the ghosts, even if the ghosts were in Credence himself.

The impulses were silly. A reform rabbi in an uptown synagogue had once labelled them “magical thinking” when they met in his office. Psychology terms, he explained. Raised modern orthodox, he had been to college before the yeshiva. Perched on the edge of a padded chair across from his, Queenie studied her knees as he explained the science.

_It’s a kiddie trick for when you don’t have the exact words for what you need. You could ask yourself instead, what’s got me scared?_

By fifteen there was no longer any chance of little girl-small. Not with the breasts she had, she was told, inherited from her mother (of beloved memory). Why had her aunt told her this? Was it meant to comfort, to compliment? The things she had left of her parents, from Russia, from before, she could count on one hand: the rug from the living room wall which they had folded into a suitcase because Tina insisted, the alphabet picture book that Tina had read to her on the plane, the family’s Torah, which had survived so many wars and been held by so many hands it almost counted for three things. A whole handful, and her mother’s breasts. What good were the breasts of a dead woman? They were nothing but another new weight to carry. Outside, on the street with Tina, they linked arms and laughed the tinny laugh you do in the dark to scare away the ghosts.

The day her parents died, she was grateful for this gift-curse, her dead mother’s breasts, her father’s Siberian hair, the relic of some great-great-grandmother whose silly songs had not been enough either. She tossed her curls. She wiped imaginary tears until _Ride all you want, girl._

She road until the three hot dogs she had eaten on the boardwalk were swimming in her throat, until the sun turned the thin skin of her shoulders and nose and cheeks red and the red stung. Dizzy, she walked to the beach and fell asleep to the sound of waves colliding with the shore and children running and teenage boys hawking water. She picked her way home in the smoky late lamplight beneath the subway overpass. _I was worried_ , Tina said. Tina was always worried.

Only now Tina was angry. She woke up early and worked late, dragging Newt off on work field trips to Staten Island and the Bronx. In the past week, they had made eye contact only twice in the hallway at night with the bathroom lightbulb buzzing in its socket between them.

 _You first_ , Tina said and slipped back through the door of her bedroom before Queenie could respond.

It didn’t help, of course, that Credence had run away almost as soon as Queenie declared her support for his cause. She would have liked to have been angry with him the way Tina was angry with her. Leave it to another boy to cause another problem, she wanted to think. The way she sometimes thought, if her mother had had the final say, maybe there would never have been any Brooklyn or “memorial services” to take the place of the funeral that could not be attended in a country that could not be visited once left behind. _Look back and turn to salt. Toss salt over your shoulder for good luck. Bread and salt to new homeowners or renters to ensure they will always have enough to eat._

Percival Graves called them so often now for updates, she had joked that they would need to install another phone line.

 _He’s worried_ , Tina said, because Teenie was too. Like Queenie wasn’t. Like she hadn’t been the first to suggest that they listen to Credence when he said he couldn’t go through with a prosecution of his sister. Who could? Teenie could have murdered their parents herself, instead of a loose trailer truck on a cracked highway, and she would still love her. That was family, wasn’t it?

 _Not when family kidnapped children and abused you_ , Tina said, but what did she know?

She had been so busy with the story, she wasn’t the one taking Credence around by the hand all the time to museums and libraries and zoos and everything in between. She hadn’t seen him in the display on evolution, only shortly before it all fell apart. Queenie had and Queenie knew. Even as a child she had been incredibly perceptive. She could always tell when someone was about to break down. People can only be stretched so far in more than one direction, she thought. Everyone snapped eventually.

For their father it had been the news from his cousin in Warsaw in ’68. She and Teenie were still little girl-small in footed pyjamas, playing with dolls. She hadn’t understood at the time, and no one would take the time to explain. Once he smiled and then he no longer did. _Bang bang, oh oh._ He used to laugh when she danced and pulled silly faces, but he showed no further joy when she came home from school in a red necktie, singing marching songs about children building a new world and bright sunshine and the whole Earth as one and summer camp for future Cosmonauts.

 _If we go to America, I’ll never get into camp_ , she had argued. _America is for imperialists._

 _America is safer for little girls named Esty and Malky_ , her father said.

She took the 1 to midtown and decided to walk the rest of the way through the park. With any luck, Graves would be home and ready to go. They would descend on Credence together, two hares turned hunters, and drag him home in a cab if they had to. Enough was enough, as Tina would say. She hesitated. Tina had always been the better taskmaster, between the two of them. With Tina there, Credence would listen. He had left his mother for her once before, hadn’t he? 

But Tina was being stubborn. Queenie shook her head and strode through the park entrance that separated bustling 59th street from green picnic lawns and horse paths. Anyway, who needed grumpy Tina around to give orders when Credence had always responded better to Queenie’s honeysweetness? _Catch more flies_ , she thought, which was unfair but true. If Credence was any kind of bug, he was probably a fly.

What did that make Percival Graves - a spider? (She tapped her chin at the fork of two gravelled pathways and chose the left one.) There had been the accusations in all the papers that Tina scoffed and sniffed over. Queenie, though it broke her heart for all of them, couldn’t help but think - so what? Newspapers and radio personalities could talk and gossip. That was what they were for, wasn’t it? Didn’t mean any of them had to listen. If Credence was happy not to go to court and to spend the rest of his life with an older man, that was his choice. Queenie was happy for him. He had seemed happy. He even looked it that day, for the very first time, before Travers dragged out that stack of emails.

That had been such a nasty trick. Even Vinda - otherwise unshakeable, impassible Vinda - had paled as Travers forced Credence to read the first pages out loud to the room. Such an awful thing to do to someone so vulnerable, stripping all the layers of privacy and intimacy back from his love and making something ugly out of it. Tina could insist all she wanted that Travers was the good guy, but Queenie would never be stupid enough to believe it again. Nobody good would make a punishment out of someone else’s joy.

If Jacob wanted to die on Tina’s hill, too - well, everyone got their choice. She wouldn’t think about it. It would only make her cry.

She was coming up on the edge of the Upper East Side now, avoiding the eyes of a cluster of dealers beneath one of the big rocks. A little boy with a shaggy dog bounded by, followed by his mother, her hair falling from its red coif. It was Tina who had such a thing against rich people. March Queenie would have found everything charming, the boy and the dog and even the dealers, who seemed to take her pink raincoat as a sign that she was “looking for a good time” and offered to sell her some at a fraction of the going price. She shook her head, frowning.

April had brought all this stress down on their heads, and now they were baking in it. 90 degrees in mid-May. Sometimes she wondered why she didn’t move back to Brighton, rent a little apartment from someone’s zeidy on the beach and sink into the crowd of retirees that lined the boardwalk in their visors and bifocals and orthopaedic shoes. Everything would be quiet then, and salt-kissed and sunny and very, very home.

That too was silliness. Fighting or friends, Tina was still the only real family she had left, and she was Tina’s. Without each other, they would be lost.

The sun was bearing down in full force now on the back of Queenie’s neck and shoulders as she cut across the lawn to the brick-lined exit. Leave it to Credence Barebone to run away from an apartment on the Upper East Side. She shouldn’t have wasted all that time walking through the park. The thought worried at the corner of her lip; she crossed the street, took the left up to eighty-sixth and then right to the building with the potted hydrangeas. Leave it to Credence Barebone to run away from hydrangeas and a doorman. What if he’d already made it to the jail and was gone before they arrived?

"Mr. Graves isn't in," said the man behind the desk when she inquired. 

It never occurred to Queenie, after the trek she’d undertaken in the park on his behalf, that Percival Graves might not be in. She fought briefly to suppress the impulse to cry, or to shout at his unhelpful doorman in the silly black hat and white gloves.

“Oh, gee,” she said instead. She smiled, less for his sake than because she didn’t know what else to do with her face.

The entire plan had hinged on Percival Graves’ involvement. What else would she lure Credence back with - her lipstick? That was a mean thought. She shouldn’t hold that against him. It had been sweet, really. She had even been planning a “girl’s night” for the two of them, wrangle him into a face mask and some lip gloss and teach him how to fix up his hair so he would look pretty. He had always watched her so intently when she was getting ready in the morning. She knew that look.She knew that longing. In just another week it would have been the two of them laughing to one of his tapes, and Teenie would have come around about the trial because Teenie always did in the end, and Jacob….

“Real sorry,” said the doorman unapologetically.

“Oh, yeah, honey, sure, no problem….”

If she held the pad of her finger to the corner of her eye, it would stop any tears from welling. That was a good old trick for a pair of eyes that had always been too leaky. Another little piece of wisdom she owed her aunt.

“Anything else I can do for you?”

The scotch-guarded coating of her pink raincoat crinkled at the elbow.

“Can I use your telephone?”

 _“_ It’s behind the desk,” said the doorman, gesturing. He followed it up quickly with: “Mr. Graves didn’t say when he’d be back.”

“That’s fine,” said Queenie. “Would you mind if I just made this call a tiny bit privately? It’s just - it’s been that kind of day, you know?”

He hesitated, brow furrowed beneath his silly cap, and Queenie thought, _oh just hurry up_.

“Sure.”

“Thanks forever. That’s so kind.”

She twisted a pale pink sleeve up the back of her wrist and tapped her pointer finger into the number “two”. Vinda always answered on the first few rings or not at all. She was always at her desk, typing furiously into the keyboard of her computer whenever Queenie had volunteered to take Credence for one of his interrogations. Sometimes, she said, she had to leave the office for a smoke, because Travers drove her “totally insane”, which seemed a very French thing to do to Queenie, who had never known any other French people and was drawing her frame of reference from black and white movies she’d seen on TV.

On the second ring: “Allo?”

“Oh good, you answered.”

“You tried to go and see the boy,” said Vinda flatly into the line. “I told you that it’s not a good idea. He is like a little bunny. We had these animals in the garden in our summer home. They see you, they run.”

The doorman had stepped only a few feet away and was tapping his fingers into the polished wood counter attached to his desk. Queenie sighed.

“I don’t have a lot of time - ”

“Look,” drawled Vinda, “if I am seeing this animal at home in the garden, you know what I do?”

“No - ”

“I am going to my father and I am asking him - _Papa, où t’as caché ton fusil_? Where is your gun?”

The line hung empty and crackling with static between them for a moment.

“I - ” began Queenie slowly. “You know, Vinda, sometimes I’m not sure if you’re joking or - ”

“Meet me at Cipriani,” said Vinda curtly. “Three o’clock. I wait for you at my usual table. If you want to meet your friend, you need to know mine first. He will help you both.”

 

 

  

The last thing to vacate Credence’s pocket was the lighter he’d shoplifted from Duane Reade on his way to the ferry that morning. He let it clatter onto the scratched counter and shoved the shaking hand back into his empty pocket as the officer tossed his keys, tapes, walkman, a ballpoint pen, and the rubber-banded roll of cash from Percy into a plastic tray.

“Sign in here.”

He scratched his name across the printed line.

“Go ahead.”

He followed the group of visitors through a door with a chicken-wire window. Somewhere in the depths of the building, an alarm buzzed. A human voice yelped and fell silent. In front of Credence, a little boy holding his mother’s hand began to cry.

Shhhh, his mother said. And then - shut up, do you want all these people to stare at you for crying?

Nagini was right, Credence thought, he should never have come to see her. But now it was too late. He was already here in this grey room with everything valuable he had ever owned in a plastic bin labelled "visitor". She expected him. Even now it seemed impossible to even consider disappointing her. Would she be wearing one of those orange jumpsuits he had seen on the television? On the news, at times, she wore normal clothing. Not her own long blue or grey dresses, but suits with skirts and blouses, like any other woman, her hair combed and hidden only by a light scarf, her blue eyes wide and deep and innocent. Imploring. The effect was jarring.

All these people are watching you, said the mother of the little boy as he wailed into the crook of her elbow.

Ma had never minded if he cried. There were times she seemed to prefer it. Times she would hit him and pause, as though waiting for a specific response. He had never considered it odd before. Maybe it was.   
  
I can’t stop, wailed the little boy. I don’t want to go in there.

Would she hit him today? He had anticipated it all week. The ferry, the stark rooms with the scuffed floors and plastic chairs and Ma in her orange jumpsuit. Small and chained to a desk, or behind a plastic wall, speaking softly into the lip of a plastic telephone. Nothing connecting them but the line that he could set down at any moment if he wanted to. Nagini had said: I think you’ll regret it if you go, Credence. What could she possibly have to say that you would want to hear?

We can’t go back, said the woman with the little boy, softer now. She looked, quite suddenly with her hair frazzled by the yellow half-light from the overhead bulbs, scared. Like she might cry herself, if the little boy hadn’t started it first.

I don’t want to go in. I don’t wanna.

We came all this way, said the woman. We can’t go back now. We came all the way here. We have to.

He followed them down the hall with his hands in his pockets and then out of them. In. Out. Ma had hated hands in pockets but not crying. Maybe this time his hands would stay in but he wouldn’t cry. Maybe he’d cry and never work out what to do with his hands. Maybe she’d hit him, he thought. Maybe he’d leave without entering the room.

The boy quieted as they neared the door, and then his sobbing picked up in earnest. Credence watched as he was shepherded through the entrance to the visitation room by the woman who may or may not have been his mother, her hand on his wrist, the other on his shoulder. Having Nagini there with him had seemed childish in the morning when she offered. He wished he hadn’t been so quick to say no.

The visitation room was a cinderblock square, painted beige and lined with squat brown tables. He counted the four windows with their latticed white bars. Outside a gull screamed. Somewhere below and just beyond the cinderblock walls of this place was the water and the ferry waiting to return him to Manhattan, Nagini at the dock, maybe a hamburger and french-fry dinner or a bag of chips. Ma was sitting at a table in the back corner near a barred window. He recognised her short, neat hair. No scarf. No cap. Only nights at home, when he was still a little boy and not a threat, had he seen her so naked. He checked the clock on the far wall, but it was useless anyway without the ability to read an hour or a minute hand. If he bolted now, they might think he had done something wrong. It felt indecent to look at her like this. Would she want him to cover his eyes? She had never demanded it when he was young, but the time he had stumbled in on Chastity fixing her hair in the bathroom mirror, she whipped him directly across the mouth with his belt and chipped a tooth. 

She looked up as he approached. Her hands were not chained to the table. Maybe it was relief bubbling up the back of his throat. He pulled his own hands from his pockets.There was a Nirvana lyric for this feeling, he was sure of it. He had just listened to the very song on the ferry ride over. Rewound and replayed it. The title evaded him now. It occurred to him that he hadn’t finished planning what he wanted to say. 

“Well, sit down,” said Ma.

“Yes, Ma.”

“You look poorly. Are you eating well?”

Her hands were folded on the table between them. Not close enough to smack, but he stiffened anyway and leaned into the plastic chair-back until it pressed into the knot of his spine.

“Fruits and vegetables?”

“No,” he admitted. “Sometimes.”

“Junk food,” said Ma softly, maybe with satisfaction, or anger. Her ambiguity was beginning to alarm him. “Rat poison. Oh well. They spray all their produce with it, too, you know, so there’s no way out.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You look pale.”

He wanted to laugh, but somehow the sound would not come out.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Ma. “You never knew anything unless I told you.”

“Sure," said Credence experimentally.

He watched her index finger twitch, her lips thinning. She carried on as though he hadn't spoken at all. 

“You know, I almost decided not to teach you how to read. It seemed like such a wasted effort on you. You were always slow. You always looked to Chastity before you did a single blessed thing.” 

Her hand jumped. If they were home, he thought, she would have slapped him. Now she had only words. It had never occurred to him before that she might be trying to hurt him on purpose with the things she said. He had always just accepted these embarrassing anecdotes for hard truths. The new thought bewildered him, overlaying the image of this new, human Ma. She was small in her jumpsuit, as he’d expected and feared. Her blue eyes wide and round and childlike, her haircut as silly and out of date as his had been weeks before.The thumb of her right hand twitched against the wrist of her left. He followed it with his eyes.

“Well, you didn’t come out all this way just to stare at me, Credence, did you?”

“No, Ma.”

In fact, all he wanted to do was look away. Her lips were dry. He licked his own and rubbed a spot on his cheek where it was beginning to prickle.

“You look pale,” said Ma again, in the same brittle tone as the woman with the little boy. “Do I frighten you so much?”

“No.”

“You told the police I frightened you.”

Her thumb twitched and then stilled. The worry of it tugged at his lower lip; she was going to hit him right here in the middle of the visitation room, in front of the guards and the woman whose back he could still see curved around the body of the little boy, now laughing at a table with another woman in orange, probably his real mother. They had the same narrow chin.

“You told them I beat you,” said Ma softly. “‘She was hitting me again and again’, you said.”

What if he walked away and joined them instead? Ma’s fingertips tapped into the tabletop like a drill, tearing him from the scene in the back of the room. 

“You told them that I abused you.”

His gaze flickered across the slowly spreading curve of her lips, the stiff smile that always preluded a blow.

“What do you know about abuse, Credence?”

“I don’t - ”

“Of course you don’t."

There was a television playing recaps of the morning news in the far corner. He scanned it reflexively for the face that wouldn't be there. Percy hadn't been on in weeks, not since he'd gone. Or since the emails. Everything about that day had tangled itself into the same knot, each detail as inextricable as the next from the whole awfulness. Emails, hitting his head, the things he had said to Percy that he wished he could forget. Ma dragged her chair closer to the table with a low scrape. 

"You don’t know anything, do you? Do you really think you had it so terribly awful with me when I fed you, clothed you, put a roof over your head?”

“You did hit me,” he said. His breath compressed around the words so that the force of it pinched his chest and throat. “Again and again, and you didn’t stop. I didn’t lie about anything.”

“I disciplined you,” agreed Ma. She studied her hands. “I disciplined you in love, never in anger. I waited. I never sent you outside, Credence, did I? To pick your own switch from the tree?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Ma, you never did that.”

She hadn’t moved from the study of her hands, but Credence had the feeling she was looming over him, occupying the entirety of the scuffed laminate between them. When she sighed, he ducked his head. The table legs were bolted to the floor. He wondered if it was precaution or if there had been an incident and agreed in monotone that Ma had never really starved him, let him freeze, let him go without a roof over his head or a bed to sleep in. It would only cause trouble to point out that there had been times, often without explanation, that she had denied him a breakfast or a dinner or even every meal for a day or more. 

“I was never drunk,” said Ma.

“You were never drunk,” Credence repeated.

“Then you have no idea the things I spared you that were not spared me.”

That’s torture, Percy had said. Terror, Credence. Wouldn’t even do it to enemies in war. He had been so careful then not to think anything close to agreement, aware that without Ma present to defend herself, even the most cautious recognition of this possible truth was sacrilege, blasphemy, a witch hunt.

“I never hurt you for the sake of hurting you,” said Ma.

“You held me under water. I couldn’t breathe.”

The little boy at the corner table had begun to cry again and was being comforted by his keeper, whoever that woman was, that ersatz mother, while the woman who shared his narrow chin looked on helplessly from across the table. Credence held the edge of the table with both hands, though he wasn't sure if he intended to push himself away or to stay put. He should have listened to Nagini. No one was happy in this place. No one belonged to anyone properly, and nothing she said was what he had wanted to hear, but he was here now. Stuck, glued to this stiff plastic chair and the thin curve of her lips and the gleam in her blue eyes as she leaned across to swipe at him as though waving off a cloud of smoke.

“To baptise you, no different from anyone else, or am I speaking to your ghost?”

 _Father, Son, Holy Spirit_.  
(As a little boy, she had him read the Catholic catechisms and The Lives of Saints so that he would know who was doing it wrong.)

“You kidnapped Modesty,” he insisted. The words that so impressed the determined Credence in Nagini's bathroom mirror crumbled like a mealy apple on his tongue. He shook his head. “You took her from her family.”  
  
(Everyone was doing it wrong, it turned out, apart from Ma and the people who contributed the most money to the New Salem bank account, but he enjoyed the Catholic pomp and circumstance in secret. Alone in bed, he blanketed himself in fantasies of incense and prayer on bended knee at the foot of some shrine, martyrdom on a pyre, or like St. Agatha with the cut-off breasts, until Chastity explained to him the shortcomings of his own anatomy.)  
  
“I saved that child from a lifetime of neglect and real abuse, and I raised her as my own,” said Ma with such force that the table trembled beneath her grip. “As I raised Chastity, and even you, thanklessly and expecting nothing in return but that you would see that you had been raised in the love of God and in his Light and would live a righteous life.”  
  
His jaw unhinged itself slowly. He wanted to tell her about the emails, even though she would never offer comfort, nothing soft - but anger and reprimand. He wanted to tell her anyway. He had hoped to die when he hit his head the final time. He had hoped she would read about his death in the newspaper and feel sorry for him, remember him as the baby in the sling on her hip or the little boy at the piano bench and grieve and regret. It had all felt so painfully close then. Like the feeling alone could have killed him. It still rattled naggingly in his chest, when he was alone in the apartment and Nagini had gone off to school or to work. Sometimes he thought of the empty church and the sting of vomit in his throat, and his heart raced, but when he tried to dial Percy's number into the payphone on the corner, the numbers got jumbled. 

Nothing she said and nothing he said, he realised, would ever make a difference. He should argue or stand up and leave, but it was though his tongue had been cut from his mouth. Who made the Earth and when, Ma? There was no practical value to the knowledge that it might be millions of years old. On the other hand, her certainty had always comforted him.

“You told me,” he said to her knuckles. “You said that you’re not my real mother.”

“Oh, Credence.”

“I was good,” he said. “I tried to be good.”

“Credence, look here.”

He didn’t flinch when she took his hand. He could pride himself on that much later, or skip over the detail entirely when he filled Nagini in. Make himself sound less pathetic. Less desperate. Maybe he would lie about everything and tell her only this, that she took his hand and he didn’t flinch.

“I am the closest thing to a mother you have ever had,” said Ma.

He followed her eyes across the line of his jaw, nose, mouth. It was stupid to be envious of a little boy in a jail visitation room, but at least that boy had the clear distinction between the two of them, ersatz mama and the helpless woman in the orange jumpsuit who was not allowed to walk around the table and hold him when he cried. Her grip tightened around his hand, squeezing a pulse too hard.

“Don’t you ever forget it.”

“Yes, Ma.”

“And be careful around that Mr. Grindelwald,” she said, her mouth pulling back again around the outline of her upper teeth. “He'll contact you tomorrow to discuss the plan now that you've ruined yourself, and to offer his help. They're going to prosecute you too, now. Did you know that?”

“Sort of.”

She rested her hand on top of his. 

“Do not put your trust in him, Credence. Put your trust in no one and nothing but the Lord.”


End file.
